(Factory girls often skip lunch so they can afford to go to dance halls, so Sarah's offers to treat them to food while they chat are most welcome.) She even visits one, although she has to wear a tacky hat and cheap beads to look less out of place. Sarah isn't familiar with dance halls, but she learns about them from Gerda's friends. He won't even let Agnes openly grieve for her sister because Gerda has brought shame upon their family. Agnes' husband, Lars, isn't being supportive.

Seeing their mother in such a state isn't helping her other two children, either. Sarah fears that her new little girl will fail to thrive. Sarah asks for the help of our hero, Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy, because the murder is weighing on Agnes' spirits. If not, the reactions of some of the supporting characters should make it clear that they were no footwear for a respectable girl. If you've ever read Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 cautionary tale, 'The Red Shoes,' then you have some idea of how shocking wearing red shoes was back in the 19th century. (Such girls assumed they were not prostitutes because they had sex for gifts instead of money.) Gerda claimed to have saved up the money to buy them herself, but it was suspected that she had become a 'charity girl'. She was identifiable because she was wearing red shoes. A good girl would have been home instead of being beaten to death in a filthy alley. This is enough to put her in the category of 'bad girl' in the eyes of her brother-in-law and the neighbors.

After the workday at Faircloth's, Gerda loved to go to dance halls with her friends.

As often true today, the workers weren't paid much - certainly not a living wage. Gerda had found a factory job, as girls did before they found a husband. Gerda had been sent to America in the hopes that she would find a husband as her sister had. Poor Agnes is having to deal with being in labor at the same time that she's mourning the brutal murder of her younger sister, 16-year-old Gerda Reinhard.

Our heroine, widowed nurse-midwife Sarah Decker Brandt, is called to deliver Agnes Otto's third child. Mark's Place is book two in Victoria Thompson's Gaslight Mystery series.

Daisy and the Pirates by J.T. Allen